Melissa Bailey Photo
Vice-Chair Hopkins-Staten: Suspension rates “unacceptable.”
Amistad Academy suspended 20 of its 96 kindergarteners last year, a rate 15 times higher than in traditional New Haven public schools.
The high rate of suspensions among Achievement First charter schools across the state prompted “alarm” among members of the state Board of Education, which conducted an emergency review of statewide suspension data at a meeting in Hartford Wednesday.
The meeting came on the heels of a report by the Office of the Child Advocate, and subsequent news stories, that called attention to the hundreds of kindergarteners suspended across the state in the 2011-12 school year.
“For our youngest students, these are rates that are just unacceptable,” state education chief Stefan Pryor said Wednesday. He called the data “alarming.” Pryor ordered an express analysis of school suspensions, which was presented at Wednesday’s meeting.
Click here to read the department’s 31-page report, complete with lots of colorful charts.
The data show charter schools suspend almost twice as many elementary kids than the traditional districts in which those schools sit.
The top four highest rates of suspension among elementary schools all occurred in schools belonging to the Achievement First network of schools. The schools are public, not-for-profit schools that operate under their own state-authorized charter, outside of the traditional local school district.
“Suspension rates are too high,” acknowledged Achievement First co-CEO and President Dacia Toll, whose group serves over half of the charter population statewide. “It is something we’re concerned about.”
However, she said, it’s important to note what “suspension” means in this context. It doesn’t mean a kid is kicked out of school for a whole day. It’s defined as “exclusion from regular classroom activity” for between 90 minutes and 10 days. (An “expulsion” means getting kicked out of school for more than 10 days.)
Toll said while Achievement First does have higher suspension rates, kids are most often missing for only a short period of time out of the classroom.
“We do have really high expectations for both academics and behavior,” she said; those high standards help the school achieve “high levels of student achievement” and parent satisfaction. The high suspension rate has not deterred kids from returning to the school the subsequent year, she added.
New Haven’s two Achievement First elementary schools had the second and fourth highest suspension rates in the state, according to the state data.
The comparison assumes that all districts are reporting to the state every time they remove a kid from a classroom for over 90 minutes.
“We are really very meticulous about tracking this data,” Toll said. “It’s hard to know whether every district in the state is being that meticulous.”
Achievement First’s Hartford Academy ranked at the top of the list, with 32.5 percent of kids in grades K to 5 receiving at least one suspension or expulsion last school year. New Haven’s Elm City College Prep School came in second with 26 percent; Bridgeport Achievement First posted 20 percent; and Amistad Academy in New Haven had a 13.8 percent rate.
Hartford and Bridgeport had suspension rates of 10.5 and 8.6 percent. New Haven’s reported suspension rate was so low that it didn’t make the list of “districts with high suspension/expulsion rates” for any age group.
Achievement First also showed high suspensions rates in middle school, defined as grades 6 to 8: Amistad Academy suspended 41.9 percent of kids those grades, the fourth-highest rate in the state. Elm City College Prep ranked 11th with a 28.2 percent suspension rate.
Board members expressed “alarm” at two aspects of the data: First, the high rate of suspensions among really young kids. And second, a high rate of suspension among black males.
Statewide, kids under age 7 faced 1,161 out-of-school suspensions and 806 in-school suspensions.
Pryor (pictured) said he has not yet made comparisons with national suspension rates, but no matter what the benchmarks are, Connecticut’s rates of suspending young kids is still too high.
Pryor declined to comment directly on Achievement First because of his role as a founding member of the charter network’s flagship school, Amistad Academy, in 1999. But he said the state will hold all charter schools accountable to their suspension rates when their charters come up for renewal, which happens every five years. And he said the state is setting up a new data system to track suspensions, and will spend the summer further researching the problem.
“We can’t lose our sense of alarm and our sense of outrage,” Pryor said.
Board members agreed.
“I’m just blown away by the under‑7 data,” said board member Patricia Keavney-Maruca of Waterbury. She wondered aloud if it has to do with the high-stakes testing kindergarteners now have to endure.
Board member Joseph Vrabely called the data “alarming.” The number of youth suspensions are “staggering,” he said. When a school suspends kids at an early age, he argued, “they’re turned off by the educational process.”
Board member Terry Jones of Shelton warned that when kids get suspended at an early age, the problem “bounces along and escalates” and reverberates through life, often ending in incarceration.
Board Vice-Chair Theresa Hopkins-Staten said the data bring to mind the school-to-prison pipeline: policymakers can predict the size of prisons based on 3rd-graders’ reading scores.
She took particular notice of the racial disparity in discipline.
Black males were suspended more than any other demographic group, no matter which type of school they were in. Statewide, black students were suspended 3.8 times more than white kids.
“We need to be mindful of the issues of race and culture” that lead staff to suspend black boys, Hopkins-Staten warned.
Achievement First
A closer look at the data shows Amistad Academy suspended young kids at a rate 15 times higher than New Haven’s public school district.
New Haven suspended 24 kindergartners, or 1.4 percent of students in that grade; and 38 first-graders, or 2.3 percent of the first grade.
Amistad suspended 20 kindergarteners, which amounts to 1 of every 5 kids. The school also suspended up to five of the 90 kids in the first grade (the actual number wasn’t reported for privacy reasons).
Elm City College Prep Elementary School suspended 16 of 62 kindergarteners and 7 of 61 first-graders.
(Click here to see how many kids were suspended in grades K to 2, by district, in 2011-12.)
“We do think the overall rates are too high,” said Achievement First’s Toll. However, she said they should be seen in context.
She said in Hartford, the one place where Achievement First had the chance to take a deep look at its suspension data, young kids weren’t missing more than a couple of hours of classroom time.
At Achievement First Hartford Academy, which drew heat for issuing 114 suspensions of kids under 7 years old, the school found that 88 percent of the in-school suspensions were two hours long.
Charter schools may be issuing more suspensions, she argued, but the suspensions last for a shorter period of time. Indeed, state data show the average in-school suspension at charter schools lasted one day, compared to a statewide average of 1.3.
Despite all the suspensions of young kids, kids don’t flee charter schools more than other schools, according to state data. The data showed about 85 percent of kids under age 7 who got suspended at a charter school returned to the same school the subsequent year, a figure that’s slightly higher than the state average.
Toll said one might get the impression that “a school with a lot of suspensions is disorderly. But our schools are noticeably more orderly and positive,” she said. Suspensions enforce the clearly delineated rules for behavior at charter schools.
The most common reason for suspensions statewide was violation of school policy. At charter schools, kids were also suspended for an “accumulation of demerits,” according to Ajit Gopalakrishnan (at left in photo with state education Chief Operating Officer Charlene Russell-Tucker), the state bureau chief for data collection and research, who presented the findings at Wednesday’s meeting.
Toll said in Hartford, most of the suspensions of young kids were driven by a relatively small number of kids.
“We clearly need to do better,” she said. “For the kids who are getting repeat suspensions, we have not been good at supporting them and getting them back to class.”
She said one Achievement First elementary school, in Bridgeport, tackled the issue and cut its suspensions by 75 percent over last year. “We need to do that across all of our schools,” she said.
Toll said Achievement First is “looking into alternatives to suspension.” The network used to offer an option called “Saturday extension.” The idea was, “if you misbehave, instead of being put out of school, you get more school,” Toll explained. “We’re taking a look at that again.”
Toll said Achievement First is also “looking to get students back to class more quickly.”
New Haven’s conventional public schools (as opposed to charter schools) ranked high on one metric: The percent of total disciplinary actions that involved kicking kids out of school. Eighty percent of New Haven’s total sanctions were out-of-school suspensions, the fourth highest in the state. Elm City College Prep came in second in the state with 82 percent.
Assistant Superintendent Garth Harries said the district is moving towards more positive behavioral reinforcement and “recuperative” methods, but “when there are severe infractions, we’re going to send them home instead.”